Imagined London Read Free Page B

still quiet length of Curzon Street, to the full-on cacophony and traffic, both foot and auto, of Park Lane, and hence into the more quiet embrace of Hyde Park.
    It is as though four different landscapes, histories, ways of living, can be encapsulated in a walk around the corner—almost any corner. One moment, the throng and the lowering office building. The next, quiet, isolation, and the window eyes of a mews house. London has nearly as many residents as New York has, yet even its most central locations never feel overwhelming in the way much of Manhattan does, mainly because of this effect, this ability to step within minutes from tumult into peace. In its variety—architectural, historical, topographical—London holds as unique and singular a place in the world as the glory of its literary legacy would suggest.
    In Howards End, which despite being named for a country house is often a poetic, even elegiac tribute to the great city, E. M. Forster speaks of this:
    â€œTheir house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare. One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats—expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierge and palms—it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses opposite a certain measure of peace.”
    Anyone who has passed from the busy Brompton Road to the lanes and streets behind it understands this description; it holds true over much of London, which is a city of neighborhoods, and within the neighborhoods a place of discreet areas, each with its own atmosphere, its own feeling, its own story. It is also a city of houses. All cities are, of course, but while other European capitals are most often thought of in terms of their grand public buildings—and Paris in terms of its pale apartment buildings, Rome its sun-colored palazzos wrapped around an atrium of garden—the essential London scene is a row of low identical houses set around a square.
    Many, if not most, London novels are set in such single-family buildings, upstairs and down. It took me a long time to figure out that the terrace house I encountered in so many novels is what we in the United States call a row house, in New York, no matter its material, a brownstone. (It also took me a long time to figure out that the council flats on estates that made an appearance in many modern novels were not grand places to live. They certainly didn’t sound like public housing projects. Bedsits, on the other hand, were pretty self-explanatory.)
    London is also a city of parks, gardens, and squares, so that much more of it is green and verdant than visitors initially suspect. (A third of London, according to one estimate, is grass or gardens. “Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets,” writes Dickens in Little Dorrit. “Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets.” But that was only in Southwark, around the debtors’ prisons.) Whole blocks of London in the springtime smell rich and musky; while a stroller moves in minutes from bustle to quiet, she may also pass through successive waves of perfume, lilacs, roses, syringa, even the stew-like scent of good rich loamy soil. A reader understands this coming into the city for the first time simply because so much of the action of so many novels has taken place in these hidden spots, only steps from busyroads, in the squares and parks. Eaton Square. Regent’s Park. They have come to have a mellifluous, slightly mysterious sound, even though in reality they prove to be more ordinary than their names. They could easily be the titles of books, not simply their settings.
    â€œI love walking in London,” says the title character of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, perhaps